January 11, 2014

José Manuel Lluent presenting second edition of "Looting and Fraud in Art" January 15 in Barcelona

Information provided by Oblyon

José Manuel Lluent will present the second edition of "Looting and Fraud in Art" at 7 p.m. on January 15 at Oblyon's headquarters in Barcelona. The event will be attended by Lluent, the author of the book; Marco Mercanti (Founder and CEO of Oblyon); Jesús Gálvez Pantoja (head of the
investigation unit of the Civil Guard); Mariano Costoso (Regional Deputy of Cultural Heritage in Catalonia) and Joan Cifuentes
Mesa (from the central theft unit and cultural heritage protection of the
Mossos d’Esquadra, the Catalonian local police law enforcement body).

The event will take place at the Barcelona headquarters of Oblyon, an art advisory firm. Due to Mr. Mercanti’s
professional background in law at Oblyon we specially care about the protection
of our cultural heritage and believe all professionals working in the field
of art should be aware of the existing problems and cooperate in the fight against
art crimes. This is why we like to collaborate in the presentation of Lluent’s
book, an important tool for information and diffusion of this
topic.

Book review

The author analyses and thoroughly gives details on matters
revolving around art fraud and looting, giving an overview on the legislation
that applies to those issues in order to be able to fight the phenomenon in an
easy and transparent way. Current laws to fight art crime are scattered amongst
the different legal administrations, both local and national as well as the ones
linking Spain to other international organizations with jurisdiction in this
matter, thus the effort made by the author to methodologically put them all together in one book make it a reference work for all the professionals in this
area.

Author

José Manuel Lluent was born in León, Spain in 1945. He studied at Escola de la Llotja in Barcelona (School of Art and Design) and at Groupe IESA in Paris (Superior Institute of Arts). After completing his studies he furthered his art expertise through the creation of ASART. One of the firms main specialization is the documentation and provenance of artworks. Specializing in the fight against fraud and spoliation in art, Lluent has worked with the group Grupo de Delitos contra el Patrimonio Histórico and Interpol.

Lluent has also collaborated with Scotland Yard introducing the identification system
SGS-INART, as well as with the Ministry of Culture in Spain and France and has
cooperated in identification tasks of artworks from the Vatican collection.